By Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea, Ph.D.
Speech at the USCCB Meeting in Dallas TX
June 13, 2002

http://www.usccb.org/bishops/frawley.htm

Good Morning. I am honored to join the groups of speakers we have heard
so far today. It has been a morning filled with great gifts and great grace.
My own offering to you today is to contextualize the characteristics of
childhood and adolescent sexual abuse; to present the experience of early
sexual trauma through the lens of the victim; to make accessible the most
common after-effects of childhood sexual abuse; and to suggest a few vital
components of the healing process. I do this based on fifteen years of clinical
work with men and women who were sexually violated as young people. To succeed,
however, I need your help and a brief story best conveys what I mean by
that.

Several years ago, my stepson, Daniel Patrick O'Dea, recommended that
I read a fantasy trilogy authored by Terry Brooks. In the first book of
the series, the young hero sets out on a quest in search of the magical
Sword of Shannara (Brooks, 1978). A weapon of enormous power, the secret
of the sword is that, when lifted by the sword bearer, it reveals to him
every aspect of his being. All the good, unpleasant and truly hideous
facets of his personality are reflected back to him in the blade of the
sword. If the sword carrier can stand what he sees, he then can wield
the sworn to do great good and to fend off the worst evil. Most who raise
the Sword of Shannara, however, cannot bear to see themselves so fully
revealed and are destroyed.

Today, I ask each of you metaphorically lift a Sword of Shannara; to
open your hearts and souls to all that the Catholic Church has been, is,
and could be under your care. I ask you to stare courageously at the full
complement of great good and great harm enacted by you and your, brethren
and especially, to reflect on your role in the devastation of childhood
and adolescent sexual abuse perpetrated by priests.

Claude Levi-Strauss declared that, "the prohibition of Incest stands
at the dawn of culture," and, if fact, represents culture itself.
Make no mistake about it. The violation of child or adolescent by a priest
IS incest. The sexual and relational transgression perpetrated by the
father of the child extended family; a man whom the child is taught from
birth to trust above everyone else in his life, to trust second only to
God. Priest abuse IS incest.

Despite the cultural universality of the incest taboo, violation of sexual
boundaries between adults and children is a universal phenomenon. Data
collected over the past two decades inform us that about one third of
all females and one fourth of all males are sexually abused in some way
prior to the age of 18. These numbers hold up worldwide. From Italy to
Ireland to India; from Thailand to Mexico, in Canada and the Middle East,
children's physical and psychic boundaries are violated sexually with
alarming frequency. Thus, the sexual victimization of minors is not just
an American problem nor is it just a priestly problem. Rather, sexual
exploitation of the young is a worldwide scandal in which Catholic priest
have participated as fully and as secretly as have other men across the
globe.

So far in these remarks. I have used the commonly accepted term, "sexual
abuse," to describe an adult's sexual traumatization of a child or
adolescent. In fact, however, "sexual abuse," is shorthand terminology
for what more accurately is named the relational betrayal of a minor by
an adult who is in a position of authority with the child and who exploits
his own and victim's sexuality to subjective empower himself by utterly
dominating the physical, psychological, and spiritual experiences of the
victim. No wonder we use shorthand. From the victim's perspective, however,
sexually executed relational abuse is the most meaningful way of conceptualizing
that which we call sexual abuse.

As we have read in the media and heard today, sexual abuse victims often
are young people for whom something or someone is missing. They yearn
for an adult who sees them, hears them, understands them, makes time for
them, and enjoys their company. Unfortunately, the sexual predator is
exquisitely attuned to the emotional and relational needs of the potential
victims. Like Fr. Geoghan seeking out fatherless children, sexual abusers
ingratiate themselves into the lives of their victims, evoking respect
trust and dependency long before the first touch takes place. When the
confused child or adolescent is frequently so emotionally entwined with
his victimizer so fearful of losing the abuser's affection or simply so
terrified that he readily and silently complies with the sexual activities
imposed upon him.

There are those who devalue survivors of childhood and, especially adolescent
sexual abuse for not disclosing their victimizations when they were occurring.
Secrecy, however, is the acknowledged cornerstone of sexual abuse. Some
perpetrators overtly extract secrecy by suggesting that the victim will
be blamed for the abuse, then taken from her home and placed in an orphanage.
They say that telling would destroy and even kill the perpetrator, or
they threaten that if the victim discloses, the perpetrator will harm
her or members of her family. Sexual abusers may also blame the victim,
accusing her of seducing the predator, thus filling the victim with the
sham and self-loathing more appropriately experienced by the victimizer.
In a more covert covenant of secrecy, the abuser provides the victim with
gifts and special privileges that both silence and instill terrible and
long lasting guilt.

Sin addition man abused minors maintain silence because they accurately
perceive that there is no one in their environment who will help them
if they disclose. It is more hopeful for a child to preserve a fantasy
that IF he told, someone would protect him than it is to reveal the abuse
to another who ignores, blames, or re-abuses him. Finally, children and
teenagers do not disclose the sexual abuse secret because they care for
the perpetrator. A central cruelty of sexual abuse, in fact, is the perpetrator's
trampling of the young person's generously and freely bestowed affection
or respect.

It is from this epicenter of betrayed trust that the mind splitting impact
of sexual abuse ripples outward. The victim, of early sexual violation
simply cannot reconcile the respected figure who may help him with his
homework, teach him how to throw a curve ball, or take him to the local
hockey game with the sexually overstimulated and overstimulating man presenting
an erect penis to suck. It is simply too much and the resulting fracture
of the victim's mind and experience often leads to a debilitating post-
traumatic stress disorder that affects every domain of the victim's functioning
and lasts for years and years after the abuse has stopped.

Let me now guide you on a tour through the corridors of a psyche twisted
by sexual transgression. It is a trip through a traumatogenically constructed,
psychological House of Horrors in which experiences of self and other
are grotesquely distorted and terrifying images unexpectedly pop out from
seemingly safe places. The visitor lurches from one emotional shock to
another in an interior atmosphere of darkness, one punctuated only by
frightening flashing lights and nightmarish unreality. Our first stop
is the organization of the victim's images of self and others.

When a young person is being abused, the psychological shock is so great
that the normal self cannot absorb or make sense of what is happening
to it. In a valiant attempt to cope with the overwhelming overstimulation
and sense of betrayal literally embodied in sexual trauma, the self splits
using the psychic mechanism of dissociation. The normal operation of dissociation
allows, for example, each of us to drive ten miles and then "come
to" with no memory of the time just past. For the victim of child
or adolescent sexual violation, however, dissociation is an exponentially
more dramatic process, one that serves as both a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, by entering into an entirely different state of consciousness
while being abused, the victim preserves a functional and safe self who
is removed from the trauma and is therefore able learn, grow, play, and
work. Many a patient has reported for instance, that she–the self
recognized as "I"–floated above the bed on which that
"other kid"–the alienated victim self–was being
abused. On the other hand, the curse of dissociation condemns the state
of self who experienced the abuse to a trapped existence in the inner
world of the survivor, a place dominated by terror, impotent but seething
rage, and grief for which there literally are no words. Because trauma
impels the brain to process events quickly and in a state of hyperarousal,
verbalizing pathways are bypassed. Instead, the sexual violations are
encoded by the child and retrieved by the survivor as non-verbal, often
highly disorganizing feelings, somatic states, anxieties, recurring nightmares,
flashbacks, and sometimes dangerous behaviors.

Often, the adult survivor's life is wracked by unexpected regressions
to his victimized self that are triggered by seemingly neutral stimuli.
Much as the Vietnam Vet who hits the floor during a thunderstorm is, in
a very real way, back in the Mekong Delta seconds before his buddy's sckull
is blown off, so too the sexual abuse survivor may be triggered into a
regression by something or someone reminiscent of his earlier traumas.
No longer firmly located in the present, the survivor thinks, feels, experiences
his body, and behaves as the victim he once was, badly confusing himself
and those around him. For victims of priest abuse, a Roman collar, the
scent of incense, light streaming through stained glass at a certain time
of day, organ music, or most certainly, interacting with priests and bishops
about their abuse may well evoke the appearance of usually dissociated
self states.

Coexisting with the violated, terrorized, grief stricken victim self,
the adult survivor of sexual abuse has within her a state of being that
is identified with the perpetrator. Through this unconscious ongoing bond
to the predator, the survivor preserves an attachment to the abuser by
becoming like him in some ways. When threatened by experiences of helplessness,
vulnerability or anticipated betrayal, the survivor unconsciously accesses
this self-state to gain a sense of empowerment. Subjectively experiencing
themselves as righteously indignant, survivors may enact at times breathtaking
boundary smashing, cold contempt, and red-hot rage. Not surprisingly,
survivors are sickened by the thought that they resemble in any way their
perpetrators and therefore avert their gaze from their own Swords of Shannara
for long periods of time lest they fragment even further at the sight
of their own abusive tendencies. I want to be clear that, here, I do not
mean that survivors become sexually abusive. While that can happen, it
is exceedingly rare. Rather, they enact some aspect's of there abuser's
lack of respect for others. It is important for therapists and, in this
case bishops, to recognize that the clay of the survivor's abuser self
was molded quite literally by the hands of a master–their own sexual
and relational victimizer. While those in relationship with survivors
can model setting limits on what they will tolerate in relationship with
another, an empathic understanding of the source of the survivor's sometimes
outrageous behavior is essential to hold in mind.

Finally, the sexual abuse survivor sometimes may enact an aspect of self
that is greedy, grandiose, and insatiably entitled, an element of self
that remains out of awareness for a long time. There comes a day in every
survivor's recovery upon which he fully comprehends what was so cruelly
taken from him. Further personal growth and healing requires that the
survivor then mourn the childhood or adolescence that never was, the defensively
idealized caretakers who never existed, and perhaps most poignantly, the
self that could have been had trust, hope, and possibility not been so
brutally shattered.

I cannot exaggerate nor can I adequately convey the soul searing pain
of this phase of recovery. One patient, at this point in treatment, cried,
"This is too much. I can't stand it–I won't–you can't
make me. I can deal with the abuse–maybe, perhaps. But the idea
that I can't go back, that my childhood is broken forever–I can't
live with that. I won't know that I never was and never will be just a
kid."

Quite understandably, the sexual abuse survivor may act to avoid the
ultimate mourning necessary to move on from the abuse and all that was
stolen from him. Launching a lawsuit against the perpetrator or against
those who abetted the abuser may be one strategy employed to deny unrecoverable
loss, while instead pursuing an illusion of full restitution of that which,
tragically, never can be restored. No matter the amount of the ensuing
financial settlement, a residue of emptiness and lost hope persists. At
the core of the survivor's being, the worst has happened yet again; he
has been paid off to go away while life goes on relatively untouched for
the perpetrator and those who shielded him.

Now let me be absolutely clear. Money can be a little better than nothing
and is what the Church too often historically offered victims. Many survivors,
in fact, resorted to lawsuits only after being stonewalled in their quest
for more personal reparative gestures. Legal action, in this situation,
represents a last ditch effort by the survivor to become an agent in his
own life. Further, a lawsuit, when all else has failed, puts into action
an understandable demand that the truth be told one way or another. In
addition, many survivors need financial assistance for therapy, substance
abuse rehabilitation, and educational or vocational training previously
unattainable because of post-traumatic stress symptoms plaguing the victims.
But money is not nearly enough, no mater how much it is, and lump sum
payments that are not individualized to meet the specific needs of each
survivor fail to meet recovery needs. Rather, what serves healing well
it much more difficult, much more personal, and much more humbling for
clergy.

Real healing for survivors requires that priests, bishops, and cardinals
conform to the template upon which rests the Sacrament of Reconciliation,
te ritual cleansing of the soul in which Catholic priests profoundly believe.
Real healing thus demands that Catholic clergy apologize personally to
each and every victim of priest abuse; not through eloquent public letters
but in face-to-face encounters. Bless me, my son or daughter, for I have
sinned. The Vatican recently cautioned that the administration of group
absolution is not an acceptable venue and that confessions should be heard
individually and in private. So, too, survivors deserve to meet with those
who have harmed them and to hear from clergy genuine confessions of failings
and remorse.

Real healing must draw from the Church a deeply meaningful commitment
that every priest, bishop, and cardinal will do everything in his power
to prevent further priest abuse, and that he will act swiftly, decisively,
and above all, publicly to remove abusers from his ranks. Finally, cardinals,
bishops and priest must do penance to restore each survivor's trust in
humanity as well as in the Church. Retreats and group processing sessions
that include survivors, clergy, and professionals are just some possible
approaches to restorative penance. Whatever penitential road is chosen,
it is essential that the clergy of the Catholic Church put their mouths,
souls, and physical beings where heretofore mostly only their money has
been. It is right and it is needed for survivors of priest abuse to heal.

Leaving the realm of sexual abuse survivor's organization of self, we
enter a related corridor on our tour, one in which we explore typical
characteristics of the victim's interpersonal relationships.

A survivor's relationships with other people are hued and shaded by expectations
and anxieties forged during their traumatic experiences. Approaching others
from within the psychological confines of post-traumatic stress disorder,
the trauma survivor exhibits rapidly shifting relational stances, painfully
lurching from periods of extremely dependent clinging, to those marked
by vicious rage aimed at the same person. Stark terror and tears can switch
in an instant to cold aloofness, while warmth and vivacity may turn kaleidoscopically
to paranoid suspicion. All this, of course, leads to many chaotically
unstable relationships, often alternating with stretches of the loneliest
isolation.

Perhaps needless to say, normal sexual functioning is almost impossible
for most survivors until well into their recovery. Too often, sex, even
with a trusted other, triggers terrifyingly disorganizing flashbacks during
which survivors sometimes literally see the face of their abuser superimposed
on the visage of their sexual partner and experience dreadful relivings
of their sexual traumas. In addition, survivors frequently are disgusted
by and ashamed of their own bodies and sexual strivings. Unreasonably
blaming the abuse on their own sexuality, they often desperately insist
that it never would have happened were it not for their self-perceived
horribly seductive bodies and deplorable sexual desires. Heterosexual
boys abused by men additionally are tormented, wondering what it was about
them that attracted the perpetrator. Sexual abuse survivors of all genders
and sexual orientations are deprived of the right to grow gradually into
a mature sexuality and, instead, are forced or seduced into premature
sexual encounters they are emotionally ill equipped to handle. As adults,
therefore, these men and women often spin between periods of promiscuous
and self-destructive sexual acting out and times of complete sexual shutdown
during which, like burn victims, they experience the gentlest physical
contact as excruciatingly painful.

Finally, there is a characteristic relational stance assumed by many
sexual abuse survivors that is particularly germane to these proceedings.
It involves others who did not abuse them but also did not protect them.

If it takes a community to raise a child, it also takes a community to
abuse one so that whenever a minor is sexually violated, someone's eyes
are closed. Throughout history and in every segment of society, the most
common response to the suspicion or even the disclosure of childhood sexual
abuse has been self-defensive denial and dissociation. No one finds it
easy to stand in the overwhelming and destabilizing reality of sexual
abuse. Thus, blindness, deafness, and elective mutism are responses endemic
to many confronted by a victimized child, an adult survivor, or a perpetrating
adult. To the extent, however, that the sexual victimization of a minor
depends upon the silence of adults who knew, suspected, or should have
known about the abuse, the burdens of shame and reparation reach beyond
the perpetrator. In the case of the Church, it is not just abusing priests
and abetting bishops who must lift a symbolic Sword of Shannara and face
what is reflected back to them in its blade. Rather, every rectory housekeeper,
every parish maintenance man, every religious woman or lay teacher, every
parishioner - any of these individuals who once felt uneasy about a priest's
relationship with a young boy or girl and said nothing need ponder their
inaction and resolve to behave protectively in the future. Zero tolerance
must include the silent as well as the predatory.

What is important to recognize at this conference is that adult survivors
of sexual abuse frequently are, at least initially, even angrier with
adults who failed to protect them than they are with the perpetrator himself.
Because the survivor's internal relationship with his abuser often is
organized around competing feelings of attachment and hate, he often feels
freer to turn the full blast of his long pent-up rage and bitterness on
those who did not protect him and who, in addition, failed to provide
for him in ways the perpetrator seemed to, albeit at an unholy cost to
the exploited child or adolescent.

How turning down another corridor on our tour of a psyche ravaged by
early sexual trauma, we examine the impact of sexual abuse on the cognitive
functioning of the victim and survivor. Part of what is overwhelmed during
sexual abuse is the young person's ability cognitively to contain, process,
and put into words the enormity of the relational betrayal and physical
impingement with which he is faced. It is striking and often bewildering
to observe in adult survivors completely contradictory thought processes
that ebb and flow with little predictability. One moment, you are speaking
with an intelligent adult, capable of complex, flexible, abstract, and
self decentered thinking. Under sufficient internal or external stress,
however, or in situations somehow reminiscent of past abuse, the cognitive
integrity of the survivor shatters and becomes locked in rigidly inflexible,
self-centered thought patterns, simplistic black and white opinions devoid
of nuance and an immutable conviction that the future is destined to be
both short and unalterably empty. For example, one survivor patient who
worked as an investment banker was so intellectually gifted that she was
considered a brilliant whiz kid in the competitive New York world of finance.
When beset by psychological or interpersonal stimuli linked to her uncle's
sexual abuse, however, she became in her own words, "stupid minded."
At those times, she literally could not think at all or could access only
immature, disorganizing and panicky ways of thinking.

If a survivor's cognitive functioning is severely ruptured by sexual
abuse, his affective life, the next stop on our tour, is even more impaired.
When a young person is sexually traumatized, the hyperarousal of the autonomic
nervous system and the body's subsequent attempt to restore order disrupt
the brain's neurochemical regulation of emotion. In addition, we are now
learning that attachment relationships also impact upon the brain's ability
to modulate feelings, with traumatic attachment experiences interfering
with effective neuropsychological regulation of affect. The brain of the
sexually abused minor thus suffers a double assault. Both the sexual traumas
themselves and the betrayal of an attachment relationship assail the flow
of affect modulating neurochemicals.

As an adult, the survivor shifts–sometimes quite rapidly–between
states of chaotically intense hyperarousal and deadened states of psychic
numbing. This inability to modulate emotional arousal often leads to interpersonally
inappropriate verbal or motoric actions when the survivor is hyperstimulated,
and to similarly inappropriate emotional and psychomotor constriction
as the individual moves into psychic numbing. Further, autonomic arousal
becomes a generalized reaction to stress in the midst of which the sexual
abuse survivor is unable to discern realistically the severity of a perceived
threat. Instead of reacting at the actual level of psychological danger,
the survivor may engage in seemingly irrational behaviors like temper
tantrums or terrified withdrawal. These behaviors do no fit the present
day situation but are perfectly complimentary to the now affectively revived
earlier trauma.

Because of the damage done by sexual abuse to affective brain functioning,
adult survivors often need psychotropic medications for periods of time
during recovery. For some, their impairments are sufficiently intractable
to require lifelong medication. These drugs are expensive and it would
be a specific and reparative use of Church funds to provide survivors
who are under the care of psychiatric professionals with the medications
they need to function more adaptively.

We now are almost finished with our psychological tour and are about
to enter what can be the most shocking corridor of all. Also partly due
to disrupted brain functioning, sexual abuse survivors often display a
truly spectacular array of self-destructive behaviors. They slice their
arms, thighs, and genitalia with knives, razors, or shards of broken glass.
They burn themselves with cigarettes, pull hair from their heads and pubic
areas, walk through
dark parks alone at night, play chicken with trains at railroad crossings,
pick up strangers in bars to have unprotected and anonymous sex, drive
recklessly at high speeds, gamble compulsively, and/or further destroy
their minds and bodies with alcohol and the whole range of street drugs.
Both male and female prostitutes tend to have backgrounds of early sexual
abuse. Survivors also are two to three times more likely than adults without
abuse histories to make at least one suicide attempt in their lives (Briere
& Runtz, 1986). Sometimes they die.

Survivor self-abuse performs a myriad of functions too complex to address
adequately today. A quick inventory of a survivor's motivations to act
self-destructively includes: punishment for the abuse he blames himself
for; mastering victimization by taking charge of the timing and execution
of harm; self-medication of turbulent affective storms; and unconsciously
seeking states of hyperarousal that then trigger the release of brain
opiods, providing the survivor with a temporary sense of calm. At an even
more deeply unconscious level, frighteningly self-destructive sexual abuse
survivors want to turn the table on present day stand-ins for those who
violated and neglected them. Unconsciously, they long to see their own
terror, helplessness, impotent rage, and shocked recognition of utter
betrayal reflected now on the face of someone in their lives. Who can
blame them?

As we exit now from our tour of the terrifyingly disorienting psychological
House of Horrors, constructed amidst sexual abuse, and maintained by its
aftermath, it should be clear that a survivor's recovery is a long, complicated,
sometimes treacherous process. There is a cohort in this country of professional
men and women who have labored long and hard in the clinical trenches
of trauma since the sexual abuse of children was dragged out of society's
skeleton closet in the early 1980's. The bishops and priests of the Catholic
Church need the expertise of professionals to effect healing both within
the Church and in relationship with survivors. Please call on us to help
you.

Psychoanalyst Le.onard Shengold entitled his book on the effects of childhood
sexual abuse, Soul Murder (Shengold, 1989). I do not think that early
sexual trauma necessarily has to result in soul murder but it most surely
batters and deadens the soul of the young victim and the adult survivor.
That this ravaging of souls has been administered by priests entrusted
with a sacred covenant to protect and enliven souls is despicable; it
is evil itself.

The Catholic Church and you, its American shepherds, are at a crossroads.
Like the recovering victim of sexual abuse, you can choose to defend,
deny, retrench, and rigidify. You can refuse the reflection of a Sword
of Shannara and turn away from all your decency, all your love and generosity,
all your arrogance and indifference. When a survivor takes that familiar
and well-worn road, further fragmentation and diminished integrity of
mind and soul ensues. But, as is the case for so many sexual abuse survivors,
another road can be chosen. Collectively wielding a blade shining with
truth and courageous determination, you can decide to lead the American
Church on a path of recovery, growth, and restored faith. This conference
could become a new epicenter from which ripples the revitalization and
restoration of souls. It is a matter of your will which road is taken.
May great grace walk with you and guide you in the days to come. It has
been a great grace to me to address you today.

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